Chapter 1
BREAKING NEOLIBERAL? CONTEMPORARY NEOLIBERAL DISCOURSES AND POLICIES IN AMC’S BREAKING BAD
David P. Pierson
Faced with a terminal illness and a strong desire to take care of his family financially long after his death, Walter White (Brian Cranston), a mild-mannered, put-upon New Mexico high school chemistry teacher, begins producing and selling crystal methamphetamine or meth. He enlists the aid of former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) to help him market and distribute his high-end product to large illegal drug operators in the American Southwest. While Breaking Bad’s story premise may seem particularly unsavory given the dangerously addictive nature of crystal meth, Cranston’s intensely intelligent and empathetic performance coupled with a large dose of dark humor have made the show a hit with cable television audiences. The black comedic elements are evident in the episode “The Cat’s in the Bag…” (1/27/08), where Walt and Jesse are faced with the gruesome tasks of disposing of a dead body and dispatching a drug dealer who tried to kill them. Walt decides that the best way to get rid of the body is to dissolve it in an acid bath. Jesse, however, botches Walt’s specific equipment requests which leads to the upstairs bathtub crashing through the second floor and depositing mounds of partially dissolved body parts splattered all over the first floor.
Besides providing viewers with a dramatic and darkly humorous experience, Breaking Bad also addresses contemporary discourses about neoliberalism and their effects on society. Before exploring these issues, it is useful to define the core beliefs that underscore neoliberalism, as well as looking at how it has been investigated in television studies. The central idea underscoring the neoliberal ideology is that the market should be the organizing agent for nearly all social, political, economic, and personal decisions. According to Robert McChesney (1999), initiating with the Thatcher and Reagan Administrations, for the past three decades, “neo-liberalism has been the dominant global political economic trend adopted by political parties of the center and much of the traditional left and the right” (McChesney 7). On the political front, neoliberalism is generally characterized as “free market policies that encourage private enterprise and consumer choice, reward personal responsibility and entrepreneurial initiative, and undermine the dead hand of an incompetent, bureaucratic government that is incapable of doing good for its citizenry” (McChesney 7). Increasingly, neoliberal ideology has eroded the powers of democratic institutions to affect public policy that can be shown to have a negative impact on “the market.” This chapter argues that the TV series Breaking Bad intersects with neoliberal policies and discourses, and exemplifies several of its detrimental social and political effects.
NEOLIBERALISM AND TELEVISION
On network television, neoliberalism has primarily been explored in reality TV programming. Laurie Ouellette (2004), for example, examines how the popular syndicated, daytime courtroom program Judge Judy with its reputation of “zero tolerance for nonsense” interconnects with neoliberal policies and discourses in the 1990s. She asserts that Judge Judy uses the courtroom as a symbol of state authority to foster the outsourcing of governmental operations and to promote the transition to a neoliberal society. Ouellette claims that court programs like Judge Judy make use of the daily trials of everyday working-class women to instruct television viewers on how to function, without state invention, and become a self-enterprising and self-sufficient citizen. Shows like Judge Judy do not so much challenge existing democratic ideals as much as they construct new models of neoliberal citizenship “that complement the privatization of public life, the collapse of the welfare state, and the discourse of individual choice and personal responsibility” (Ouellette 232). Ouellette, working in conjunction with James Hay, continued to explore how reality TV constructs “good” neoliberal citizens in their 2008 study Better Living Through Reality TV. Reality TV primarily functions as a cultural technology to cultivate good citizenship through self-governance. Reality TV offers instruction and aid in managing lifestyles, health, and finances as well as providing people with ways to improve their homes and personal appearances. Reality TV does not so much promote a neoliberal ideology as it provides accessible models of citizenship for neoliberal social structures. Although reality programming often focuses on individual crises and concerns, it rarely addresses the social inequalities of socioeconomic status, race, and gender that may have contributed to these “individual” problems (Ouellette and Hay, 2-5).
Similarly, Toby Miller (2006) finds that though reality TV and news programming excel as models of commercialized entertainment and consumption, their depoliticized discourse does little to engage audiences with the serious problems confronting our world. Miller draws on examples from news coverage of the war on terror, food and weather coverage programming to reveal that audiences are narrowly viewed as individualistic consumers and denied access to the information they need as citizens. He asks why does the Weather Channel fail to cover the “everyday risks posed by global warming” and why does the Food Network ignore pressing health issues such as childhood obesity, genetically modified crops, and the fast food industry? The model of citizenship promoted by television’s news and reality programming is one that focuses on neoliberal individual choices and responsibilities, and is completely devoid of political or social issues. Likewise, Janice Peck (2008) maintains that “neo-liberalism’s defining political practice is precisely that of de-politicization.” Peck examines how Oprah Winfrey’s iconic rise and success on daytime television was due, in part, to the neoliberal social climate from which she emerged in the United States. Winfrey rebranded her daytime talk show away from “trash TV” to become the nexus of a positive, self-empowering therapeutic force for her regular TV viewers and devotees. Peck declares that Winfrey’s status as a cultural icon helped to construct and promote a neoliberal ideology among her devoted fans and followers.
A few scholars have explored neo-liberalism in fictional dramatic programming. Eric Beck (2011) investigates how the character of Omar Little in HBO’s The Wire both corresponds to, and departs from, the neoliberal demands of capitalism. Omar as a subject resides in the middle among a plethora of organizing stratum that includes the police, drug gangs, drug addicts, government, labor unions, teachers, and administrators. Beck shows that, with the exception of Omar and his band of renegade thieves, the series’ other characters (e.g., cops, criminals, addicts, politicians, teachers) are all circumscribed within the institutional bounds of neoliberal capitalism. Through its characters, The Wire illustrates how neoliberal capitalism effaces distinctions between work, life, leisure, love, and politics. Beck finds optimism in Omar’s flawed, but defiant character along with the fact that capitalism must rely on a subjectivity outside of itself in order to produce and reproduce its social relations.
Neoliberal discourses concerning social risk are present in the popular C.S.I. television franchise. Michele Byers and Val Johnson (2009) claim that C.S.I., with its focus on forensic technologies to solve crimes, reinforces the notion that citizens have been abandoned by the state, especially the police and court system, and that risk is a part of everyday life. In most episodes, crimes are resolved less through litigation and sentencing than through the identification of the elusive ‘truth’ about the criminal and how he or she did it—which is often a moral lesson in the idiosyncratic nature of risk and the impossibility of protecting oneself from it. If lawyers and the police have failed us, C.S.I. reminds us that we still have the truth of the body which can only be made to speak for the victim by forensic science. Byers and Johnson find that C.S.I. represents the neoliberal concept of “governing through crime” because it accepts the notion that crime cannot be completely controlled and is the act of rational, calculating social actors (xv). Breaking Bad shares a similar conception of crime and criminality. Neo-liberalism, in general, refuses to acknowledge that the social is a realm that informs human action, like crime, and is the necessary domain for resolving social conflicts and finding solutions. This study examines how Breaking Bad exemplifies neoliberal discourses and policies in the areas of criminality and law enforcement, drug policy and enforcement, entrepreneurism, and public schooling.